8. Whereof the intranslatable words of divers languages are a proof.
A moderate skill in different languages will
easily satisfy one of the truth of this, it being so obvious to observe great store of words in one language which
have not any that answer them in another. Which plainly shows that those of one country, by their customs and
manner of life, have found occasion to make several complex ideas, and given names to them, which others never
collected into specific ideas. This could not have happened if these species were the steady workmanship of
nature, and not collections made and abstracted by the mind, in order to naming, and for the convenience of
communication. The terms of our law, which are not empty sounds, will hardly find words that answer them in the
Spanish or Italian, no scanty languages; much less, I think, could any one translate them into the Caribbee or
Westoe tongues: and the versura of the Romans, or corban of the Jews, have no words in other languages to
answer them; the reason whereof is plain, from what has been said. Nay, if we look a little more nearly into this
matter, and exactly compare different languages, we shall find that, though they have words which in translations
and dictionaries are supposed to answer one another, yet there is scarce one of ten amongst the names of complex
ideas, especially of mixed modes, that stands for the same precise idea which the word does that in dictionaries it
is rendered by. There are no ideas more common and less compounded than the measures of time, extension and
weight; and the Latin names, hora, pes, libra, are without difficulty rendered by the English names, hour, foot, and
pound: but yet there is nothing more evident than that the ideas a Roman annexed to these Latin names, were very
far different from those which an Englishman expresses by those English ones. And if either of these should make
use of the measures that those of the other language designed by their names, he would be quite out in his
account. These are too sensible proofs to be doubted; and we shall find this much more so in the names of more
abstract and compounded ideas, such as are the greatest part of those which make up moral discourses: whose
names, when men come curiously to compare with those they are translated into, in other languages, they will find
very few of them exactly to correspond in the whole extent of their significations.
